CAROLYN SAVIDGE     ARTIST’S STATEMENT      2026 Agora

 

On a farm I started: balanced on a gate at garden’s end, lost in a dancing vision. As time passed, the dream became real: a life in dance, from a love of nature’s gifts to stage – worldwide dance and teaching, Barbados Dance Theatre, Laban, Martha Graham, Limon, Isadora Duncan, Ballet, Afro-Caribbean artists, icons shaping my world, informing my work for stage and film.

 

Then the final curtain call (two children now). My second husband’s slow, painful decease. I bowed and left the stage, began to search. I saw grief, myself, and the world through a new lens. So it continued, the only boundary now: time.

 

Ten years have passed since emerging from that last stage door. I used to dance. Now it’s done, yet creation remains in me.

 

Intuition drives me as it once made the dance. I’m germinating, curating expressions in vessels, seeding works.

 

Thoughts not always pretty as truths unravel through clay and found objects. Death and decay, skulls, dried vegetation, patterns in landscapes, intrigue. And my thinning, falling hair.

 

More grief and pain: three wedding dresses now hang on wardrobe rails, mere fodder for moths. I close the door on marriage.

 

Materials embody a stitched and layered life. A miscellany gathered from dusty cupboards echoes feelings, senses, memories.

 

My mind whispers: is this the truth?

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Surprise in hand and heart, glimpsed in eyes who wonder at my body of work. The sound of love and laughter rings, an essence of change.

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Grandchildren rush in.

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Still, I balance on the farm gate, musing, laughing at old age, the need to create burning bright on my horizon. A following wind still shapes the passion to form, and inform.

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Carolyn Savidge 2026